


Abendemfindung (evening sentiment)

by Aja



Category: Wir sind die Nacht | We Are the Night (2010)
Genre: 1920s, 20th century politics, Absinthe, Berlin (City), Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Motherhood, References to Edgar Allen Poe, References to Hitler, References to Mozart, Vampires, Weimar Republic, Yuletide, Yuletide 2014, a smattering of femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 09:29:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2807663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She trailed off, suddenly overwhelmed by it all—the enormity of the building they were in, with its looming vaulted cathedral arches and half-price bottles of Dover's powder; the way <i>Dr. Caligari</i> made her feel like a trembling, excited fledgling afraid to fly; the marvel of the child growing in her belly, and how she felt consumed by the future for its sake; of the rumblings that the Italian blackshirts and their Roman takeover was just the beginning of similar nationalist movements springing up across the continent. </p><p>It all made her feel at once as though history started and stopped in the span of a moment no bigger than this; as though everything she would ever be, everything her son or daughter would ever be, everything the untold centuries of civilization would ever be, began and ended right here by the shoe polish rack.</p><p>Or, Charlotte, before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Abendemfindung (evening sentiment)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kattahj](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattahj/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, kattahj! I really enjoyed writing this and thank you for the opportunity.

The dress she was wearing that night was dark blue, a shade darker than navy. It was a Madeleine & Madeleine, and she’d taken a day trip to Paris to have it fitted over Ernst’s objections—she needed to watch the baby, mend his jacket, tidy up the place, not spend all her money on frivolous attempts to bed movie producers. Ernst was serious, ambitious, and deeply preoccupied with minor details like making sure the ledgers were in order, making sure he owned three of everything, and making sure she always wore the sapphire earrings with the alabaster setting he liked so much. 

He was so different from anyone else Charlotte knew, which was why she’d liked him when they’d ducked into Wertheim together to wait out a sudden rain one afternoon. He’d expressed no contempt for acting when she’d told him it was her profession, but he hadn’t been overly interested either. This was a bit new. She knew too many movie people like herself; it was easy to drown oneself in the endless parties and high-toned pretension of the film set. It was even easier to feel, between the constant arguments over _Nosferatu_ , the private viewings of _Madame DuBarry_ in smoke-filled viewing rooms, and the endless stream of casting calls and auditions, that one was in the center of a historical moment that would never come again—a real moment that meant something, one they’d be talking about for decades, maybe even centuries. 

She’d found herself awkwardly trying to explain all of this to Ernst that day in the department store, while the rain beat against the windows and sent the vendors on Leipziger Place scurrying to cover their wares and duck under awnings. She was in the middle of a laborious explanation about why the Prana studio was closing when she trailed off, suddenly overwhelmed by it all—the enormity of the building they were in, with its looming vaulted cathedral arches and half-price bottles of Dover's powder; the way _Dr. Caligari_ made her feel like a trembling, excited fledgling afraid to fly; the marvel of the child growing in her belly, and how she felt consumed by the future for its sake; of the rumblings that the Italian blackshirts and their Roman takeover was just the beginning of similar dreadful nationalist movements springing up across the continent. 

It all made her feel at once as though history started and stopped in the span of a moment no bigger than this; as though everything she would ever be, everything her son or daughter would ever be, everything the untold centuries of civilization would ever be, began and ended right here by the shoe polish rack.

“I wonder, though,” Ernst said suddenly in his faltering voice, as if she hadn’t been speaking at all, “Do you think they have hair tonic here? I normally prefer pomade, but lately my scalp has been feeling dry.”

She laughed; she couldn’t help it. From there it all slid so easily into place: she helped him locate a bottle of Eau de Quinine; he bought her a bottle of Rêve d'or and invited her to have lunch with him the next day at Café Josty. Within a month he was accompanying her to her doctor’s appointments, and she was deliriously happy. She found it extraordinary that he didn’t care in the least that she was pregnant, let alone pregnant by a man who was no longer in her life, one she hadn’t much had interest in to begin with. He didn’t seem to mind that he was inheriting a family and a wife who didn’t intend to give up her career just because she became a mother. He mostly just seemed interested in things like: would the baby cry a lot, did she suppose? He dearly hoped not.

She refused to stop auditioning until well past her doctor advised her against it, and it was this, she thought afterwards, that had made her stand out among the crowd of blondes and brunettes jostling for their chance in the limelight during that heady year. It was her willingness to be photographed from any angle while sporting a baby bump seven months along that kept her face fresh in the minds of Babelsberg and UFA. Ernst thought it was ludicrous, of course—a detriment to her health as well as the baby’s for her to be out all hours auditioning for parts she knew she couldn’t get. Still, she did manage to line up a few weeks of work over those endless months. Bit parts, mostly, where she only appeared onscreen above the stomach. Still, they made her feel serenely accomplished. By the time she was a few months out from her pregnancy, her waistline was back to its original waifling size, and it only took her two auditions to land the role in _Das Blut_. 

“You look fresh-faced as a baby yourself, not like a mother at all,” the director, Reinholdt, said as he walked her out to her car after the audition. His hand only strayed to her ass once—a clear sign of his professional respect. “How did you do it?”

“I gave up smoking,” she said, releasing his arm with a wink. “Also poker and gin.”

“Sounds like no life at all,” he answered.

“My husband doesn’t think so,” she replied, ducking into the car with what she hoped was a delightfully saucy nod. She knew then, that early day in April, that she had the part, and she felt as if she had wings. Her daughter was the most beautiful child in all of Germany, and her husband was a queer, funny man and she adored him. She was going to make them all the toast of Berlin. Her spirits held high all through the next six weeks of filming, even during all the sad fuss about that poor Jew Rathenau.

In _Das Blut_ she was a tormented virgin pursued by a vampire, but one that owed more to LeFanu than Stoker. There were no lesbian vampires on screen, of course, but she was still intrigued by the relationship between her character, the winsome, pale Camille, and the tempting succubus Marguerite. 

“It’s going to be a huge success,” she assured little Berthe, who looked up and burbled at her as if she concurred. Charlotte had named her Berthe after her grandmother. She liked the idea of her ancestors’ spirits converging in one pair of deep brown eyes, in one crooked smile. She hadn’t really known her mother’s mother, but she liked the idea of her, strong and elegant, eloping from Paris to Prussia in the middle of the war fifty years before. In her mind, she channeled that same graceful resilience as she portrayed the waiflike Camille and her tormented struggle to resist the evil vampiress. She liked to imagine her daughter inheriting those qualities two-fold: twice the capable nature, twice the poise. And hopefully far more intelligence than Charlotte had.

She spent months that year coveting the precious tiny lace frock her daughter would wear to the premiere of _Das Blut_. It was a pale shade of blue, almost white, accented with a navy collar to accompany her own dress. But when that night in November finally came around, nothing went as planned: Berthe was collicky and ill-tempered and refused to stop crying. After reconciling herself to the fact that nothing would equip her to be still for 90 minutes, Charlotte finally broke down and begged Ernst to stay home with the baby.

“Are you ashamed of me?” Ernst asked, polishing his glasses for the third time in as many minutes.

“Of course I’m not, darling,” Charlotte insisted, although she did sometimes worry about him around her vicious, needling friends. “I just need you to look after Berthe while I go to the party. I’ll be home by midnight, I promise.”

Ernst frowned. “You needn’t think we’d disgrace you,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “It is after all merely a UFA picture. Everyone knows they make average sorts of movies. They’re hardly going to expect you to be the next Dagover.” 

It was always the negative comments one remembered most. Charlotte was still thinking about that one hours later, after she’d stormed out of the flat in a huff and braved the red carpet smiling and alone, archly telling the press lined up outside the theatre that her husband had stayed home to watch the baby. It stung, well into the movie, even as she was marveling at the image of herself nine feet high and transfigured with fear, her face backlit against a set full of jagged shadows and unknown terrors. I can feel it, she saw herself saying: a foreign element beneath us.

She was still thinking about Ernst and his lack of appreciation for her at the after-party, surrounded by well-wishers and fans. No, she wasn’t the next Dagover, or the next Henny Porten, or even the next Bergner. She was something all new, she thought. Every toss of her head seemed fraught with meaning. They could all see it, she was sure.

To celebrate the weird gothic mood of the film the producers were serving absinthe and opium at stations set up around the rented dance hall. The walls were hung with heavy red drapes that cast an eerie tint over the ballroom. It reminded her faintly of the masque of the Red Death and made her shiver where she stood. 

Everyone who was anyone was there, which was why she supposed such a pall fell over the room when a thin blonde woman took the stage for a solo number. Charlotte had never seen her before. She had sharp features and hair that cascaded in tight curls over her shoulders. In her black evening gown she looked every bit the part of the cabaret songstress. But when the pianist began to play, the notes ringing out across the hushed assembly, it seemed to be a folk song. It took her another moment altogether to place it: it was Mozart, a song she hadn’t heard since she was a child listening to her cousin fumbling through ballads over holiday visits.

The woman’s voice was not trained—she was hoarse and raspy on the high notes, but the effect served to make the song seem all the more desolate. The melody returned to her as the woman sang, but she had never realized how sad and lonely the words of the poem were until now—made all the sadder by the strange and inescapable feeling that the singer’s eyes were on her, Charlotte, the entire time she sang:

_It is evening. The sun has gone down, and the moon shines silver. So, too, do life’s loveliest hours disappear and fly past like a dance. The curtain rolls down on the theatre of life. Our play is over, and tears are already flowing on our grave._

_Like a gentle breeze blowing from the west, I have a quiet foreboding that soon I, too, shall end this pilgrimage of life, and fly into the land of rest._

_If you weep at my grave, my friends, and mourn over my ashes, I shall appear to you, and breathe the breath of heaven on you._

_If you only weep a teardrop for me, place a violet on my grave, and look gently down upon it._

_Grant me your tears, and they will be the loveliest pearls in my diadem._

When the singer had finished, the quiet in the room lingered, as if the audience were allowing the final note of the song to fade into melancholy by mutual, silent assent. The woman slipped off stage while the pallor still hung over the company. Even when Charlotte had recovered enough to reach for another glass of absinthe, she still felt dazed, and unsure whether it was the refreshment or something else making her feel so odd. 

She cried off from a dance with her co-star and made her way into one of the gallery rooms off the main hall. In the lounge, a group of men and women were gathered around a radio listening to what seemed to be an urgent broadcast. She listened for a moment but could make no sense of it. “What is it?” she asked one of the women nearest her. Charlotte recognized her as a bit part actress from the UFA studios and automatically gave her the encouraging smile she reserved for actresses of less stature than she. The girl barely seemed to notice.

“An uprising in Bavaria,” the girl answered. “In Munich. The workers’ party—they’ve marched on the Marienplatz.”

“It’s not the workers,” the man next to her declared heatedly. “They don’t know what they’re doing, none of them. It’s that man. Hitler. Damn socialists.”

“Who?” Charlotte asked.

“Ein fremdes Element unter uns,” said a smooth voice beside her, and Charlotte, turning, found the blonde woman from before leaning into her space. 

Up close her eyes were even sharper, her features even more strange and pallid. She reached out and placed her hand on Charlotte’s arm. Her touch was shockingly cold, and Charlotte backed away, stricken by an odd thrill of alarm. 

“I’m sure it will... it will all work itself out somehow,” she murmured, backing from the room. 

In the hallway she collected herself, gathering her composure as she listened to the rattle and thrum of the newscaster’s voice on the radio. “Taken over a brewery in the Haidhausen district...leader fired a gun into the ceiling and held the Staatskomissar at gunpoint... marched on the square and occupied the central Munich police station...military moving to suppress...”

Abruptly it was all too much for her, and she suddenly wanted desperately to be at home nursing her baby, leaning her head against her husband’s shoulder and thinking about absolutely nothing. She moved away from the lounge, further down the hallway toward the end of the corridor. Here there were fewer lamps lining the walls and the shadows darkened in the corners of the hall. Again she thought of the Red Death, of the odd arrangement of rooms and the blood-red window waiting in the last chamber. As she came to the end of the corridor she heard voices from the final room to her left. The door had been left slightly ajar, and she had just placed her hand on it to seek company from whoever was inside when she recognized the speaker. 

“All in all, a fun little movie,” Volke was saying. He was UFA’s chief financial distributor. Charlotte had met him several times and each time he had seemed to her more grim and serious than the last. She had despaired of ever making a good impression upon him, and she paused where she stood, prepared to back away.

“We occasionally have to throw away a few Marks on foibles,” came the response; it was her producer, Reinholdt. “The public is clamoring for horror. We have to throw them a few scraps every now and then.”

“No! You mean you don’t expect _Das Blut_ to revolutionize cinema?” 

The deep rumble of Reinholdt’s laughter followed. “Oh, yes, a script censored all to pieces and a two-bit cast, it’s just the kind of thing that will make us the envy of Hollywood.”

“Not even your little _schwangere_ , eh?” Volke chuckled. 

“Don’t be rude,” Reinholdt said. “You spend months waiting for a woman to be normal-sized again and then she gets married before you have a chance to fuck her. I could hardly stand to look at her afterwards. Had to give her the part so I’d stop having to see her at my auditions.”

“Well,” said Volke. “She can’t act, that’s for certain, but at least she looks good on camera. She’ll bring in the boys for this picture and then she can go home to her new husband and kid and tell them she’s been a real actress.”

Charlotte took her hand off the door.

There was no one in the room across the hall, and so she entered it noiselessly. It was a small, empty room, used for rehearsal, she supposed. The lights were off but the drapes were open, and through the tall windows on the opposite side of the room she could watch the pulsating electric lights of the city: the traffic light tower in the center of the circle below, the streak of the S-Bahn entering Potsdamer Place some distance away. 

She was not a part of history. She was not a part of the enormity of the moment. No one would remember _Das Blut_ a few years from now. She would go home after tonight and be a mother and a wife. Her daughter would know her as her pretty, competent mama who used to be an actress. There was no larger moment in time, no glittering star in the firmament fixed on her and her career. She was as nameless as the inflamed worker in that Munich beer hall. They would both be forgotten tomorrow.

She hadn’t realized she was crying until she saw her tears reflected back to her in the windowpane; another moment and she felt arms winding around her shoulders.

“It’s okay,” said the woman with the blonde curls. Later Charlotte would remember the image of her tear-stricken face in the window, her reflection turning into what seemed like an invisible embrace.

“You’re so beautiful,” said the woman, cradling her close as Charlotte leaned her head against her shoulder. “You’re immortal. They’re fools not to realize that. All of them.”

A peal of boisterous laughter sounded from across the hall. The woman stroked Charlotte’s hair. “Close your eyes, dearest. Close your eyes.”

Charlotte did.

“Who are you?” she heard herself murmur. She’d meant to ask something less rude—for the woman’s name, probably. But this felt right, too. She felt herself drifting. She could no longer be sure.

“I already told you,” said the woman. “Ein fremdes Element unter euch.” 

And she placed her mouth against Charlotte's throat.

  



End file.
